Linux 3.2 kernel released: What you need to know

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After a long delay due to kernel.org being hacked in August 2011, Linux 3.2 has finally been released. It’s a whopper of a release with optimizations and tweaks in nearly every facet of the OS; here’s the rundown of what’s new inside and why you want to upgrade to it.

First and foremost, the Intel GPU (graphics processing unit) DRM/KMS driver has been optimized to use Intel’s RC6 graphics power-saving feature. In a nutshell, that means that battery life on Ubuntu laptops is going to get a lot better with the Precise Pangolin (12.04) release of Ubuntu. DRM (the Direct Rendering Manager) and KMS (Kernel Mode Setting) aren’t things that a general or even hardcore user needs to concern themselves with, but, basically, it’s the pieces of the graphics puzzle that deal with handling the memory management of the drawing, backgrounding and re-drawing of applications as you minimize and switch between applications. The actual power savings are going to differ from machine to machine, but every machine should see improvement.

Canonical’s Ubuntu has taken this power saving a step further with its PMUtils crowdsourcing initiative. If you are a confident command line interface Linux user, please go take part. Your data will help battery management everywhere.

Another improvement to the 3.2 kernel is in the networking TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) stack. The WiFi drivers have been improved, and PRR (Proportional Rate Reduction) support has been introduced to the kernel. What this means is that your browsing experience will be faster as transmission rates will be adjusted in a more timely fashion to recover from throttling and other bottlenecks you may encounter along the way to your destination. File transfers should see the same efficiency boost, speed-wise.

Some filesystem optimizations have been included too, designed to make Linux more scalable in large storage configurations, especially on enterprise systems. Reliability and ease-of-management options are included, as well as larger allocation blocks in the EXT4 filesystem to speed up disk access for sharing files and drives across operating systems like Windows via Samba. If you run a Linux file server at home or in the workplace, this is welcome news.

Finally, it should be mentioned that code has been introduced to assist with system throttling when writing large amounts of data to slow drives, making the user experience snappier when you have to move large amounts of data to and from drives or removable media. Syncing your MP3 device shouldn’t reduce your machine to a stuttering crawl so much with the enhancements.

There are many more optimizations coming with the 3.2 kernel that deal with large-scale servers and storage solutions (thin provisioning and the Btrfs filesystem to name a couple) that aren’t mentioned here, as well as a number of tweaks and services that are outside the scope of desktop or small business computing. The information above is what you need to know as a general or fairly hardcore Linux user.

Want to try it out now? You don’t need to wait until an official release. Ubuntu’s 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) is available now and comes with the 3.2 kernel; download the (beta) daily build. If you just want to upgrade your existing system to 12.04, just open a terminal and type out “sudo do-release-upgrade -d”. That will grab the proper libraries and run through installation for you. Alternately, if you like using a nice GUI with your upgrades, you can type “sudo update-manager -d” and you will see that an upgrade is available to you (pictured right).

All in all, this is one of the larger kernel improvements that we’ve seen, with many improvements under the hood. Have you upgraded to the 3.2 kernel? What’s your experience been?

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Anonymous

gentoo user here… am compiling the 3.2 kernel as we speak. *hopefully* mtp devices are supported more maturely now… isn’t it ironic that android devices have a hell of a time syncing playlists to banshee/rhythmbox/amarok?

Doug Bates

As a Ubuntu user I upgrade to 11.10 (Incl Kernel 3) and found it broke my Wifi. The lack of functionality was ciritical to me and many others so I have had to regress to 11.04

I do not understand why the article concludes with the installation of Ubuntu when its subject is about kernel 3.2. Ok: kernel.org has been hacked but you can also use github :D.(I’m joking…) I am very happy that the first comment was made by a gentoo ‘s user (also if I’m a fan of “The Man”). The sense of this comment is that Linux is a kernel is not a distribution. By the way exist the plural for distribution, so I suppose there is some other distribution than Ubuntu.

Uchan utchanovsky

Definitely agree with you il buda
Jason, why don’t you mention that the next Ubuntu LTS using this version of kernel. Kernel isn’t about Ubuntu.

or change this article title into:
Precise Pangolin with kernel 3.2 for next release:
What you need to know

http://www.mrseb.co.uk Sebastian Anthony

Ubuntu is by _far_ the most popular desktop distro of Linux — I think it’s OK to include Ubuntu-related trivia in such a story :)

Next time we can write the story from a server point of view, though, to keep things balanced!

Callme Shane

Ummm There is Linux Server, then there is Linux Android, then there is Linux Minty, then there is Linux Debian, Then There is Linux Redcap…. and somewhere waaaaay down the bottom of the heap is Youbum2 Linux.

Luigi Forte

Anyway, RC6 power saving it’s still broken for a lot of machines out there, so we don’t have RC6 enabled by default in this release.

J. Andrew Lanz-O’Brien

Debian’s still on Linux 3.2-rc7, so I’ll be waiting a week or so most likely. Exciting news though, since I’ve got desktops, laptops, and servers running Linux.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_6JLLCPT7HTRVTCHWIUI2ZPSHWY Jackson Jackson

What the hell with all the Ubuntu crap?

Callme Shane

It’s because Youbum2 IS crap.

The dumb fucks grew brains and decided to impose it upon all the users.

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